Is your mind a turntable? Are your emotions imitations? Are your orgasms filed under the Dewey decimal system? Do you look both ways before dying?
It is a brilliant, irritating, silly, and important book–and those four adjectives apply, often simultaneously, to just about every one of its many pages. Lipstick Traces is an essay without a thesis, a history without causality, a confession without intimacy, a prophecy without belief. Above all, it is a dream of cultural violence: a kind of violence that emerges from nowhere, flickers for a moment, and disappears again. In pursuit of that dangerous chimera, Marcus constantly circles his subject–until, in the end, the act of circling itself almost becomes the subject.
This is the moment–he calls it “negation”–that Marcus stalks, dreams about, hallucinates, creates. He wonders: Did anyone else emerge from nowhere? What is “nowhere”? Does it have its own history, its own voice? So he sets off in search of punk’s unknown precursors–those “secret” individuals or groups who, like the Sex Pistols, just appeared one day, hurling their blank, dreadful message at a world that immediately forgot about them–if, indeed, it ever registered their existence. He concentrates on three 20th-century avant-garde movements, one well-known, two relatively obscure: the dadaists, the Lettrists, and, above all, the Situationists.
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Lipstick Traces is, in one sense, just a strange narrative about strange people who held strange ideas: a flawlessly written piece of hip aesthetic sociology, a microwave blast thawing out some deep-frozen ontologies, some cool tales from the modern crypt. But Marcus is after bigger, stranger game–he’s pursuing the unicorn of the absolute. His whole enterprise is an obsessive search; it is suffused with yearning for a return to a primal scene, a founding intuition, a rupture, a hit–a moment he experienced during a few strange days in Berkeley a quarter-century ago. By finding the aesthetic heart of these movements, Marcus hopes to find the blank secret of modernism itself–a secret he cannot escape. (“It is 25 long years since Greil Marcus spotted himself outside the window of his personality . . .”)
In the exhausted late 70s, the defiant roar of the Sex Pistols was essential, the only possible way back to rock’s anarchic roots. Lipstick Traces is about people and groups like the Sex Pistols–people who ripped things apart, who saw the world as something they could fight. Without knowing what would follow, knowing only that what appeared in front of them was false, they found their freedom in striking at reality. They were not nihilists, because they intended to make a better world. And their tactics were based on a philosophy of therapeutic hatred.
But it’s not until his merry-prankster time machine smashes into the 20th century that Marcus strikes creative-nihilistic paydirt. His contemporary sources and references are just as eccentric as his older ones. He compares the impact of “the last Sex Pistols concert” (the title of the longest section in the book) to the Apocalypse, but also to Five Million Years to Earth, a remarkable British horror film of the late 60s; he follows the life of one Michel Mourre, who in 1950 ascended the altar at Easter Mass at the cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris to proclaim the death of God; he peers admiringly in at the drunks and prophets holding forth in Zurich’s legendary Cabaret Voltaire. Above all, he meanders through the labyrinthine theoretical corridors of the Situationists, a group best known for furnishing many of the cryptic slogans that suddenly appeared on Sorbonne walls in May 1968.
The thesis is brutal. Everything we do at every moment of our lives is unreal; our imagination belongs to the Man. Our task is to unconstruct the nature of things, awaken from our trance. (Not to deconstruct them: deconstruction, which denies you can ever wake up, has approximately the same allure for a romantic low-modernist like Marcus as a clove of garlic does for a vampire). The project is dialectical: the blank face of “the real” must be seen as human, as alterable and free, while our “individual freedom” must be seen as paltry, mechanistic, imprisoned.
